That was a winter of fire alarms. Smoke set off the blare one afternoon in mid-February, shrieks bouncing through the halls of my small-town high school as we exited, half-costumed, onto the frozen grass. Our science-teacher-cum-set-designer had decided that burning bamboo poles for our South Pacific set was a good idea. The strobes flashing from the walls when the warning system smelled smoke told him otherwise.
Something in my father’s heart wasn’t working right. Until that afternoon, we didn’t know it. Even when my mother tried to call me six or seven times to tell me about the ambulance, that tests had found something serious and they were rushing him to the hospital, the fire alarm swallowed up my ringtone’s harsh jangle. I didn’t see the missed calls until after the belching red trucks had pulled away.
Anyway, I had other things to worry about: my best friend was dating the boy I had liked for all of high school. He was in the pit and she was in the chorus, and they spent the whole afternoon kissing in front of everybody. I was restless hot.
Musical season did that to me. It had a way of making me push at the boundaries of my small life like they were damp bed sheets twisted around me. The year before I’d played Lola, the sexy part in Damn Yankees, and paced down the hallways for hours trying to make my hips smolder as I walked. I’d performed a strip tease as part of the choreography, sliding gaudy tulle to reveal translucent black tights, booty shorts, a corset. It had been obscenely uncomfortable for my friends’ fathers, and I’d thought the whole thing delicious.
Opening night sparked several reckonings. My director was called to the principal’s office and my father called the director and the director called me. My father asked why the director always cast me as a hoochie. The principal threatened the director’s job. The director told me to keep my clothes on.
Apparently the principal had noticed me walking the hallways with a bit too much swing in my hips. It looks like she’s been having sex, the principal said. This concern about my fractured chastity made sense in a place where, rumor had it, the superintendent didn’t accept Muslim exchange students for fear they’d have to pray in the halls. I figured it wouldn’t help to tell my principal that I had read Our Bodies, Ourselves from cover to cover, dog-earing chapters entitled “Masturbation” and “Lovemaking with a Woman,” and had learned that virginity was a construct.
Everybody’s worries were allayed senior year, then, when South Pacific came around and I was cast as the eccentric old lady. That’s how I was dressed when the fire alarm went off during the third to last dress rehearsal, sending us actors shuffling to wait on the cold pavement, lighting quick cigarettes and wiping wet eyeliner, until the bulge-bellied men gave the all-clear. It was only then that I thought to check my phone. I had twelve messages.
Daddy was in the hospital. The only reasonable response I could muster was to cook chicken parmesan. I had never made it before, but knew to pound the frozen meat against the counter to thaw it, rubbing it in slimy egg yolk and cooking it in the oven until it was still pink at the bone. My sister ate it crying, the clenched flesh thick, the sauce-laden breading gloppy under her fork. Beneath white layers the muscle was the color of an aorta. Daddy was in the hospital. He had needed to be helicoptered to an even better hospital for surgery. My sister cried over the chicken.
He came home diminished and dizzy, a scar on his hip. He was boozy from anesthetic. He laughed a raspy laugh. For the next couple days, he enjoyed recounting what things looked like from the inside of the ambulance, the beeping monitors, the placebo white. I had never really thought he’d die—not beyond the first moments of checking those messages, when the very air shivered with dread—but there was something scarily tenuous to the thought of all that rubber going through him. When we talked, as I got ready for school the day of opening night, I heard his voice, its pump of breath and tissue, with a new cast of awe. As we drove past the lower school on our commute that morning, the small building shrieked with the sound of a fire alarm.
At the cast party a couple of days later, we seniors got wine-heavy and played spin the bottle with wet lips, tongues loose and hungry. For a moment I felt like Lola again, tipsy, a rip in my stockings. The play had gone off without errant stripteases or burnt bamboo accents, and my father had promised to begin going to the gym every day. That night, as the rest of us messily kissed over the sticky coffee table, my best friend and the boy I liked knit their limbs together in the other room. That kind of heart trauma still seemed the most important.
2025